


at dusk when work is over

by idekman



Category: Daredevil (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: AU, Diner scene, F/M, Fluff, background karen/matt to an extent, extended diner scene, it's mentioned - Freeform, kastle - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-02
Updated: 2017-08-02
Packaged: 2018-12-10 06:06:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11685624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/idekman/pseuds/idekman
Summary: "She’s always, struck, in moments like this, how soft he seems, how a man who will sometimes stumble into her apartment bathed in other people’s blood is so gentle with her.A little touch on her elbow to steady her here and there. Or how he always makes sure to walk closest to the traffic when they’re on the pavement together, as if he’s scared she might fall into the road somehow.On days like this, when he insists on paying for dinner and hands her her coat as she stands, she almost forgets that he kills people at all."the diner scene goes a little differently





	at dusk when work is over

**Author's Note:**

> based on a prompt from [vorrible](http://vorrible.tumblr.com/) on tumblr "diner scene: extended edition"

 

When he brings up Matt in the diner, it feels like deflection.

 _Of course it is_ , she thinks, after the fact.

But that’s later. In the present, her mind takes a moment or two to buffer. She’s been working on keeping _Matt_ and _Frank_ as two separate entities. It’s as if, by doing so, she can somehow justify what she’s doing. With Frank, it’s as if Matt no longer exists, and she doesn’t have to feel guilty about the lying, about being sat in a diner with Frank Castle whilst she’s supposed to be tucked safely away in witness protection.

(And when she’s with Matt, and Frank no longer exists, she doesn’t have to think about how recently, late at night, when she shuts her eyes, in the slippery seconds before she falls asleep, she thinks of Frank. Frank’s voice and Frank’s touch and Frank’s hand, low and heavy on her waist, where it used to be Matt’s.)

His name sounds so strange coming out of Frank’s mouth. _Murdock._ He separates out the syllables a little, something of a twang making the consonants harder. _Mur-dock._

At first she’s just impressed that he’s been paying enough attention to parse them out. That when she had said _you don’t lie to me_ , she had also meant _but he does._

But then she starts talking, words flowing out of her, to cover her embarrassment – her humiliation, really, because she hadn’t realised that her school girl crush had been so obvious but now she remembers, of course _, of course_ , that first time they’d entered Frank’s hospital room together, they’d been holding hands. Just for a second, but they had.

It’s not until she stammers out _hard guy to get to know_ that Frank’s entire face picks up, quick enough that she stops talking altogether. She just waits, instead, watches the way his gaze darts across her face, quick as a flash, trying to get a read on her, head tilting when she glances away.

When he speaks, he leans across the table. Impossibly serious, all of a sudden.

‘Do you know?’ He asks her.

She pulls back, to look at him. For a moment they both tangle, trying to parse out what the other is saying with the slope of their shoulders, fingers tight around a coffee mug.

Frank looks away first. Towards the window. She goes to meet his gaze again so suddenly she practically moves with the motion.   

‘Know _what?’_

But Frank’s face is placid now, shaking his head a touch, and she can’t break him into pieces and figure them out the way she usually can. So she scowls down at the table top as she tries to run through everything she knows about Matt, thinks and thinks. Of his constant absences, of the bruises on his face, of his charm, of the woman in his bed, of his voice, low and rough and ready and oh-so familiar, and –

‘Oh god,’ she breathes out. Frank’s face spills into something uncertain and crumpled all at once. She thinks she might have turned white. When her hand comes to her mouth, it’s shaking. ‘It’s him, isn’t it?’

‘Come on, Page –’

‘He’s – god, I’ve been so _stupid_ –’

‘Hey –’

‘I have to –’ and then she’s standing, rattling their coffee cups as she wrangles her way out of the booth, blind with confusion and rage and there, again, _embarrassment._ Her face goes from white to red and her eyes are stinging because Matt is _Daredevil –_ she’s been so _stupid_ and Frank was _sat_ here watching her burble about him like an idiot, having known all along, and – _and ­–_

‘ _Karen.’_

She stops. When she looks down, Frank’s hand is on her arm. Not gripping her, not holding her. Just a gentle placement, barely-there. He nods towards her seat. She sits. She doesn’t know what else to do.

There’s a splash of wet across her wrist and she realises she’s spilt her coffee across the table top, hands shaking too badly to hold the cup. She expects Frank to tut or snark at her but, silently, he grabs a few napkins from the dispenser and patiently mops it all up.

‘Have you known this whole time?’ She manages, finally. She can’t look at him. Outside, traffic crawls past the window. A girl wrapped up in a winter coat shuffles past and it makes her cold, rushes a shiver up her spine.

‘A little while, yeah,’ he rumbles. She waits, expectant, and he starts shredding a napkin as he pushes onwards; ‘I figured it out at the trial. The guard – he said something to me. And Murdock, he – he looked like he could hear it.’ Frank pauses. Looks down at the napkin. Carefully places it down. He’s so precise, sometimes, with his movements. It always surprises her. ‘Then, his little speech – _New York needs heroes?_ ’ He looks so derisive at that, lip curled up, that if this were any other day, any other time, Karen might laugh. ‘That… That wasn’t about me. That whole speech wasn’t about me, or my trial, or my – my family. At all. It was about him.’

Karen nods, swooping her head low.

‘The way you say it… makes it sound obvious.’

Frank has no response to that – to him, it must have been, he must have suspected right from the very start, to have put that all together – and so the silence spools onwards, until finally, Frank says,

‘So?’

For a while, she listens to the sound of the diner. The waitress takes an order, clinks a tray against a table. One half of a couple a few tables back picks up a salt shaker. Music crackles out of the radio in the background, nothing she’s ever heard of. A footstep, the scrape of a chair, a little electric flicker as one of those crappy overhead lights they always have seem to have in places like this blinks on and off. For a moment, she can shut her eyes and it’s almost like she can pretend this is a normal day.

When she opens them again, Frank Castle is still sat there.

‘So what?’

He purses his lips, studying her with those quick, dark eyes again. Shrugs.

‘I thought – I dunno. Knowing might… change something.’

She wants to blow up in his face again, wants to scream across the diner top at him, but she suddenly finds that she can’t. She’s tired and her brain, which she knows should be buzzing with Matt, with _Matthew Murdock_ and _the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen,_ two more separates which have become conjoined, somehow, is not.

‘I’m sorry.’

It’s so quiet she almost misses it, but when she forces herself to look at Frank he’s staring down at the table top, soft and quiet.

She’s not sure what he’s saying sorry for. Sorry for telling her, sorry that she didn’t know, sorry that Matt never told her, sorry that when she said _he’s a hard guy to get to know_ , she meant it.

‘It’s okay.’

Frank glances across at her and her brain isn’t full of Matt at all. He’s not even on the periphery.

It’s just Frank Castle. And her. And this diner.

 - 

(They don’t come back deliberately.

They just end up here, along the way. She’s working a case and he’s decided, like he often does, to tag along. He claims that it helps him get useful information but she suspects, in the hollow of her chest, that he just likes to walk alongside another person. Likes to do ordinary things like this – duck into the first diner that they see, because the rain is hard and because she wasn’t getting far with the case anyway, so they may as well stop for some coffee before the long walk home.

It’s not until she gets a few steps in that she stops and Frank nearly walks into the back of her, steadying her with a small touch when she’s knocked off-balance. She laughs, then, and glances to him, waiting for him to make the realisation. He shakes his head but there’s something of a smile there too. It feels so long since they came here, although it can’t be more than a year.

The waitress is the same, although if she remembers them she doesn’t comment. They order food this time. Frank gets the pancakes, she the waffles. When they arrive they do what they always do, which is to split it so they each get half, because neither of them can ever decide quite what it is they want.

The silence is comfortable as they eat and so the both of them fall into it. Every so often, Frank will ask her how her food is, if she wants another coffee, but other than that they remain quiet. At peace.

And so they pay their bill and they leave and Karen thinks that that will be that, that they will step outside from under the little awning’s shelter and go their separate ways and she will see him the next night, just like normal. Just like always.

Instead, Frank catches her elbow, keeps her hovering in the doorway for a moment. The diner behind them, the rain and the night ahead.   

‘D’you remember what we talked about last time we were here?’ Frank asks, and for a moment Karen genuinely can’t remember. Then her nose crinkles, and she responds;

‘Matt. Daredevil –’

‘No, no, not that. We were talking about the trial. About how Matt knew something was wrong when that guard spoke to me.’

It’s so long ago, the trial and the conversation, that she can’t quite recall what he’s referencing but she nods along anyway, absently brushes a stray raindrop from her coat.

‘Do you remember the trial?’ He seems – if not urgent, a little intense. Which is not unusual for Frank. The sort who, once he has his teeth around a topic, will not let it go until he’s seen it through. It’s both her favourite and least-favourite thing about him.

‘I mean. Yeah, I remember it was a mess –’

‘That day, the day I went on the stand. I was all dressed up in that damn monkey suit you made me wear –’

(She remembers. He’d refused to wear the tie she’d picked out for him, and for some reason his childish reluctance had made her smile so _much._ )

‘When I sat down, you leaned over to Foggy and said something.’

He’s staring at her now, won’t look away, and she finds that she can’t either, swallowed up by that dark gaze, by that infectious tenacity. His face is shadowed by the awning and she expects hers is too, a little warm light from the diner’s interior illuminating the planes of his cheekbones, that funny bump at the top of his nose. She’s always, struck, in moments like this, how soft he seems, how a man who will sometimes stumble into her apartment bathed in other people’s blood is so gentle with her. A little touch on her elbow to steady her here and there. Or how he always makes sure to walk closest to the traffic when they’re on the pavement together, as if he’s scared she might fall into the road somehow. On days like this, when he insists on paying for dinner and hands her her coat as she stands, she almost forgets that he kills people at all.

‘Yeah, I –’

‘What was it you said? Do you remember?’

She searches for a moment – but then the words are there, right in front of her, clear as day. She even remembers how she’d sounded when she’d spoken; wavering, tone hushed.

‘I told him that something wasn’t right.’

Frank blinks, settles back – she hadn’t even realised that they’d both tilted forwards a touch until he pulls away. He glances to the street, to the passing traffic. Turns his whole head. Builds himself up a little distance and then returns to her and asks;

‘How did you know?’

She opens her mouth, but he barrels onwards, abruptly;

‘When I said – said that I’d do it all again. You didn’t look surprised, that I was throwing my own trial. You didn’t even looked – I dunno, shocked, or whatever, until I started shouting. You just looked… Mad.’ He pauses, heaves in a breath and forces himself to look her square in the eye. ‘And you didn’t look away, either. Kept right on staring at me, even as I told a whole god damn court room that how much I liked killing.’ His brow furrows together and she thinks, somewhere in the back of her brain, a distant part of her should be panicking. None of it is. ‘How did you know that something was wrong?’

And she doesn’t have an answer for that.

God, how could she? Christ, what _possible_ answer could she give? _I knew because I read your body language, Frank. I knew because I saw something in your eye, something like hurt and curiosity. I knew because I looked at your face and just the turn of your mouth that day was different. I knew because I couldn’t stop thinking about you, so when you became someone different that day a hundred alarm bells went off in my head all at once._

_I knew because, I think all along, right from the moment I saw you strapped into that hospital bed, I was a little bit in love with you._

‘Because I know you, Frank. That’s all it is.’

There’s a long, long moment, where he just looks at her.

 

Feels as if, some days, that’s all they ever do. Look, and then look away, and leave each other for someone else or somewhere else, some other thought or time or moment.

 

But now, when he touches her, low and heavy on her waist, she doesn’t think of Matt. Doesn’t think of Daredevil, or the trial, or the Punisher.

It’s just Frank Castle. And her. And this diner.

 

When Frank reaches for her, she’s there too. As if they’ve just been waiting to meet all this time.)

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> i feel like i didn't fill this prompt properly IM SORRY I TRIED i got distracted   
> but i had so much fun writing it, if you'd like to send me kastle prompts or see more kastle content/fic, then hit up my [kastle tumblr](http://castlenpage.tumblr.com/) or my [writing tumblr](http://idekman-a03.tumblr.com/) yooooo.   
> also i noticed when frank says "murdock" in the diner scene he pronounces it exactly the way dwight schrute says "muckduck" in the office and that's all i can think of now whenever i watch that damn scene.diner scene: extended edition – prompt from @vorrible


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